Hows it work

[dejai]

How does Jirr actually work and waht are its advantages / disadvantages?

[jirr]

How does Jirr actually work and waht are its advantages / disadvantages?

jirr mainly uses JNI wrapping for calling the native methods within irrlicht.

pros and cons in short:

+ speed (significantly faster than java 3d)
+ mostly similar to irrlicht in terms of code (cpp examples are easy to transfer)
+ tries to keep up with any major version of irrlicht
+ state of the art 3d for java
+ direct x and open gl support build in
+ real java classes to program with
+ callbacks from native code (custom scene nodes) and overloading of native classes possible
+ can be run from the web (using webstart)

- (small) overhead when calling native methods compared to pure native code, roughly somewhere between 1 and 7% (depends on machine and task)
- not all functions of irrlicht are supported (some uncommon ones)
- textures have to be loaded from disk - no in-memory transfer java -> native currently for this task